India Inc set to go green

The Govt will permit the formation of land-share companies and encourage contract and corporate farming, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 28, 2007, 03:17:34 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Corporate India may soon play a bigger role in agriculture. The government intends to make this possible by allowing the formation of land-share companies and permitting contract farming and corporate farming.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will discuss these and other proposals with state chief ministers at a meeting of the National Development Council.

One proposal calls for allowing a group of farmers to become shareholders of a company in proportion to the land they own. The shares will be transferable among farmers but cannot be traded among non-farmers to avoid corporate takeovers.

Agro-processing companies will, however, be allowed to own up to 25 per cent equity in the company. The proposal states, "A farmer thus can doubly benefit from farming and share in agro-processing unit."

The government also wants to bring a comprehensive law to increase the participation of companies in the farming sector. The model bill suggests that adequate provisions should be made in state Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Acts to allow companies to buy produce at a predetermined price from farmers. The advantage for farmers? They will get technical inputs and better seeds from industry.

Another proposal is an attempt to end the licence regime in the running of fruit and vegetable markets. The committee says, "The option for private investments in agriculture marketing is restricted. Under the APMC Act, only state governments are permitted to set up markets. Further, the licensing of traders in the regulated markets has led to monopoly of the licensed traders, acting as a major entry barrier for a new entrepreneur."

Also on the NDC's agenda will be a plan to allow retail foodgrain ventures like Wal-Mart-Bharati and Reliance easy access to farm produce.

The government expects the private sector to invest about Rs 12,230 crore in agricultural marketing, including setting up warehouses and providing institutional credit to farmers. The committee said the plan was to check the fall in foodgrain production. Wheat production, for example, has fallen by 0.11 per cent since 2001. “The trend can lead to a serious risk to food security of the country in a longer run,” the committee said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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